COLUMN ONE : Wyoming: Back From the Future : Oil brought instant prosperity and visions of an unending boom in the 1980s. Just as quickly, oil has taken it all away.

Benham’s Restaurant was almost empty because the lunch hour had passed. Earl Benham, sitting in his cramped little office, was talking about the good times.

There were days during the oil boom when people would wait two hours to get a table. Wallets were pumped up. Money flowed as fast as a Wyoming river in springtime.

Benham kept hiring more people to work in the restaurant. Soon enough his payroll numbered 100, and sometimes that wasn’t enough for the crowds that flocked to one of Casper’s best-known eateries, where million-dollar deals were often worked out on napkins. Benham can remember when 700 people a day were rolling into town, looking for their share of the prosperity.

So furious was the pace in Casper and the rest of Wyoming that no one really paid much attention when the uranium mines started closing down in the early ‘80s, after the U.S. government demand was sated.

Then the bottom fell out like a trap door. Wyoming was bludgeoned by the oil bust that also drove Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana to their financial knees. Trouble was, though, that not many people outside Wyoming seemed to notice what was happening to this sparsely populated, isolated state.

Other states got most of the attention while Wyoming perhaps suffered more, at least by proportion. Benham had to fire 60 of his employees when times really turned ugly and expense account lunches disappeared.

The Casper city manager had to lay off 107 people, almost a quarter of the municipal work force. In other boom towns around the state, the story has been much the same, with populations sometimes halved, banks failing because of bad loans and people walking away from their homes because they could not meet their mortgage payments.

Now, almost 10 years after the beginning of the oil decline, the Cowboy State has hit bottom and is searching for a way out of economic malaise.

Wyoming, which was growing faster than Florida a little more than 10 years ago, is now the least populated state, with an estimated 471,000 residents. Put another way, everyone in Wyoming couldn’t fill up Denver. If it weren’t a state, Wyoming wouldn’t make up one average congressional district. In one of Wyoming’s horse-betting parlors a $20 wager sometimes can change the odds.

Between 1970 and 1980, the state population grew by 40% and there seemed to be no end in sight. Three out of 10 Wyoming residents were migrants at the end of that decade. But more than 40,000 jobs and roughly a tenth of the state’s people were lost in the ensuing 10 years. Of those, almost 6,000 were lost in 1989.

“I suppose it can be described as everything from character building to devastating,” Gov. Mike Sullivan said. “We’ve lost 40,000 to 50,000 people. That’s a sizable loss. And it wasn’t just a gradual decline. It was a precipitous drop.”

These are tough times for a state that in 1975 passed clean-air standards five times more stringent than federal regulations in anticipation of a long-term boom that would necessitate the opening of perhaps 36 coal-burning power plants.

Wyoming, in its 100th year of statehood, may be looking at further tough times down the road. Without oil and uranium revenues to feed the state’s coffers, Wyoming must rely on tourism and, to a lesser extent, coal mining, to keep its economic engine running.

At a time when Wyoming desperately needs diversification--something often discussed but seldom done--only 3% of the work force is employed in manufacturing (the lowest proportion in the nation). Much of the employment is in government or the service industries.

Wyoming has one of the lightest tax burdens per capita. There is no income, corporate or inventory tax, and both property and sales taxes are low. And while that would seem to be a major incentive for businesses to relocate in Wyoming, there have been few takers.

As a general barometer of how the state is faring: The number of people using food stamps in Wyoming is nearly 28,000, an 80% increase since 1980.

“It’s one state that’s going to have a tough row to hoe,” said Philip M. Burgess, president of the Denver-based Center for the New West.

In some respects, little has changed in this vast rectangle of land from what was written about its beginnings. “Early Wyoming,” wrote historian Frederick L. Paxson, “was a thoroughfare rather than a destination.”

What permanent settlers the state did get came mostly with the building of the Union Pacific Railroad, which made its way across the country in the 1860s. The railroad construction crews brought with them such a bawdy, rowdy entourage that they became known as “hell on wheels.”

At the time, Wyoming was part of Dakota Territory, which soon tired of trying to police the railroad gangs. So the Dakota Legislature, without a dissenting vote, asked Congress to cleave off its southwestern part. Thus Wyoming became the only territory formed because of too much hell-raising. In 1868, Congress put together Wyoming Territory out of parts of the Dakota, Idaho and Utah territories. The boundaries formed at that time, around 97,914 square miles, are the ones that exist today.

One of Wyoming’s major sources of pride is that it was the first place in the world to grant women equal rights with men, but even that has been a bit overblown with time.

According to Wyoming historian T. A. Larson, giving women the right to vote was little more than “a Chamber of Commerce gimmick” to entice people to the territory at a time when there were six men for every woman. If it was a ploy, it didn’t work.

“It did not attract people because the jobs weren’t here and the women weren’t going to come here, except the prostitutes,” Larson said.

Another point of pride is that Esther Hobart Morris, whose statue graces the front of the state Capitol, was the first woman to hold public office. That’s true, but she was a justice of the peace appointed to fill out the term of a man who had resigned in the mining camp of South Pass City, where her husband ran a saloon. She served just nine months, handled 26 cases and never sought public office again. A Cheyenne newspaper owned by her son was the first to dub Morris the “mother of women’s suffrage.”

With all of its difficulties, one of Wyoming’s major strengths is that it remains a relatively unspoiled land--half of it owned by the federal government--that has some of the most spectacular scenery in the United States. It has Yellowstone National Park, the nation’s oldest and largest, as well as Shoshone National Forest, the first ever designated. It has the towering Grand Teton Mountains and Devil’s Tower National Monument. It has Jackson Hole, one of America’s best skiing areas and one of the few bright spots on the Wyoming economic front.

The downside is that most of the tourist destinations are in the northwest corner of the state, and visitors do not dawdle much along the way. That has not been lost on towns that need an economic boost. Laramie, home of the state’s only university, is pondering the development of a Western theme park with a restored territorial prison as its centerpiece. An $800,000 bighorn sheep center is being considered for the tiny town of Dubois.

These plans and others, however, have the look of Band-Aid solutions for a state that has been left behind as others in the Rockies have moved forward. While Wyoming has great mineral riches, it has no core city at a time when almost all employment growth in the West has been in large population centers such as Denver and Albuquerque, N. M.

Wyoming has become a place in which the wealth has been divided and is thus not attracting growth. Cheyenne is the seat of government, Casper is the city of business and Laramie is the center of education. Richard High, former editor of the state’s largest and most respected newspaper, the Casper Star-Tribune, was only half joking when he suggested that the major functions of all three cities should be moved to one place.

How and when Wyoming will work its way back to economic health is a question that is on the minds of most of its people. A poll conducted last year by the Wyoming Heritage Foundation found that the economy was the major concern in the state.

The good news is that during the boom years, legislators had the foresight to put aside $1 billion from taxes on oil and mineral production to be used if times got tough--such as they are now.

Because that money is there, the state government has not had to resort to desperate action to try to bolster the economy. While people have been moving out, the reserve fund has allowed the state, for instance, to maintain a quality educational system.

Gov. Sullivan’s pet project is a scheme to take $250 million of the fund and loan the money to a California company that would build a natural gas pipeline from southwestern Wyoming to the West Coast.

Proponents of that controversial measure argue that the long-term benefits would be worth investing a quarter of the state’s kitty. Opponents say that when the demand for natural gas is there, pipeline companies won’t need a low-interest loan from Wyoming as an incentive to build such a line.

“Think what we could do with $250 million,” said Cheyenne economist Dick O’Gara, who opposes making the loan.

O’Gara said that Wyoming probably isn’t a candidate for heavy industry for two reasons: not enough people and a lack of large quantities of water in most parts of the state. Tourism is fine, he said, but that means hourly wages for unskilled work rather than salaried employment. Attracting high-tech industry is a good idea in theory, he said, but that usually develops around an academic community.

“I think what we would like to see is slow, quality growth into the future and a diversification of the economic situation,” O’Gara said.

Burgess agreed. He suggested that Wyoming needs to play to its strengths--as a great, wild country with no pollution, little crime, low taxes, affordable housing and light traffic.

Burgess said that having the reserve fund severance tax money allows the state to “fix the roof while the sun is shining.” He also said that Wyoming must promote its natural beauty as a lure.

“They’ve got to work with the cards they’re dealt,” he said. “You can’t become something you aren’t.”

Otto (Beef) Bollin, a retired grocer in the small town of Douglas, was reflecting on the boom and the bust. There had been the oil workers and the good times, then the bad times when people went broke and had to move out. Business for him, as it was for restaurant owner Benham, had been good, then not so good. Now Wyoming was as it was back in the old days, and he wasn’t half sorry to be rid of transients looking for work.

“We’re getting back to the home folks and people you can trust,” he said.